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After 25 years of making music, acclaimed British electronic pop band Hot Chip are still moving to their own beat. By Brodie Lancaster.
Hot Chip are still ready for the floor
Over and over and over and over. On a loop. Ad infinitum. For 25 years, the British electronic pop group Hot Chip have been building, performing and travelling in loops.
Formed in 2000 by schoolfriends Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, the group has always been an exercise in reference and restraint, assembling meaningful pieces from music history, like an aunty with a scrapbooking obsession, and recasting them into something the group can shift and move to.
Making dance music with an emotionally resonant core has been Hot Chip’s modus operandi for decades – moving songs that make us move. For all these years, the songs have felt just as handmade as that collage: the human tactility of hands clapping, pressing keys and playing drums and guitars solidified them as a reliable and respected live outfit offering more than merely pressing buttons and singing over tracks.
With the release of their first “best of” record, Joy in Repetition, Hot Chip – which also includes Owen Clarke, Felix Martin and Al Doyle – are looking back and doing so with mixed feelings.
“We are really in this nice position where you meet quite a lot of people that have grown up with your music and talk about how it meant a lot to them,” Taylor says. He and Goddard are sitting across from me at a picnic table in the garden next to Relax and Enjoy, the studio run by Goddard and Doyle, who is also a member of era-defining dance outfit LCD Soundsystem.
Around us in the wild, overgrown garden are grasses a third of a metre high, dotted with purple foxgloves where the bees are swooping on this morning in late May. We’re just around the corner from the quaint and historic Arnold Circus, a quiet public courtyard bordered by a school, the upscale restaurant Rochelle Canteen and blocks of flats that are either allocated to public housing or priced at hundreds of thousands of pounds at minimum. It’s a picture of London in miniature: as we discuss the clubs that embodied the city’s underground music scene that have been shuttered due to shifting priorities for young people, gentrification and post-Covid economic pressures, busy labourers unload ladders and supplies at a job site, and the nearby Shoreditch high street, with its boutiques and members’ club, purrs to life a few blocks away.
In addition to the collection of hits on the record – “Ready for the Floor”, “Look at Where We Are”, “Boy from School” and “Huarache Lights” – is “Devotion”, the compilation’s closer and a new exercise in psych-pop. Goddard and Taylor play it for me inside the studio, where the walls, floors and ceiling are covered in lovely blonde wood. If it weren’t for the expensive recording equipment and endless stacks of instruments, synths and speakers, we might be sitting in a very fancy sauna.
“The studio is such a cocoon and sanctuary,” Goddard says. “It’s very often quite a calm, gentle, warm little space where people don’t really interrupt you.” As if on cue, Doyle – who designed the space with his LCD Soundsystem bandmate James Murphy – pops his head in to announce he’s off to get his hair cut.
When Goddard describes the studio’s qualities, he does so as lovingly as he talks about his son, with whom he went to see Tyler, The Creator in concert the previous night. Watching the rapper creatively perform fragments from his discography has Hot Chip thinking about what the live experience of Joy in Repetition might look and feel like. But to plot that out will require the pair – who met as kids and are now in their 40s – to look deep into their past creative decisions.
“I see old photos of us or old concert footage, I’m always a bit surprised by how it sounds or how we look or what we were doing at the time,” Taylor says quietly, as if he’s thinking out loud. “It’s like it’s different people because it’s quite hard to have a clear view on how you’re changing over time or what you used to be into. It feels quite different from what we’re doing right now. We were quite bold and into doing things our own way from the beginning, I think.”
“The beginning” could mean many things. It might refer to Taylor and Goddard meeting as 11-year-old schoolboys in South London. Or it might mean their early experiments around the year 2000, when they began tinkering with cheap instruments in their bedrooms.
“We literally didn’t really know what we were doing,” Goddard says, smiling. “We didn’t have anyone helping us and we were just left to our own devices in my bedroom, messing with things and doing our best. We were really just doing whatever we wanted.”
Since their first EP, Mexico, in 2001, Hot Chip have made eight studio albums together, earnt nominations at the Grammys and the Mercury Prize and collaborated with a long list of heroes, among them Brian Eno, David Byrne and Jarvis Cocker.
The songs they brought together on their best-of album typify a series of musical milestones and turning points in their time together. Tracks such as “Boy from School” and “Over and Over”, Taylor says, “represent a particular point in time where we saw a slightly bigger audience coming along with us.” The connections those songs engendered with other musicians made the boys from London feel “like we were accepted, a little bit, into a bigger canon of dance music. It felt quite important to us that there was some recognition”.
When Taylor sings, “Look at where we are / Remember where we started out / Never gonna be without each other’s love again,” he might as well be singing to Goddard. Where Goddard is gregarious and quick to laugh, Taylor is softly spoken and dry. The two are so aligned and in sync. One will patiently wait for the other to finish a thought before building on it. More than once they finish each other’s sentences. I mention, as a point of comparison, the Australian band The Avalanches, who described the love story at the heart of their 2020 record We Will Always Love You as being, in part, reflective of the lifelong creative bond between bandmates.
“There’s something similar to our relationship there, in terms of the commitment to this project and belief in it from an early age, and then sticking with it through all the different phases of your life,” Taylor says. “I know it’s just us two who’re in this interview, but we’ve all been together for quite a long time now, making group decisions and trying to figure out what it is we want to do and committing to going on the road and making records and never going, ‘Oh, we’ve done that now. We don’t need to do another record.’ ”
Far from it. Goddard says reflecting on his legacy in Hot Chip has got him excited to play and experiment with new ideas.
“We’re in that nice moment, in terms of making a new record, of just spending a lot of time with each other in here and trying things,” he says. “As you get older, you wonder whether you are allowed to branch out into other kinds of music that you haven’t attempted before, whether there’s some kind of age limit on trying to do a trap song or something, whether you can embody that.”
Their songs have always borne a proud metatextual quality. Hot Chip make dance music about making music, about collecting sounds, about moving to a beat, about being in spaces built for sweaty bodies and endless loops. Even as, decades in, those questions arise about age limits.
“You get that sometimes, where people feel like they need you to explain why you’re still a band,” Taylor says. “There’s a lot of questions about ageing and keeping on going and whether you are still relevant and all of that sort of stuff that I feel slightly gets in the way of the fact that clearly we’re very passionate about making music as Hot Chip. We’ve found a kind of identity and a way of doing things, but also we want it to change and evolve.”
Perhaps it’s my defensiveness over this band or my own insecurities about getting older and still feeling compelled to imbibe and dance and know what happens after 3am that I can’t let this idea go – that dance music has an expiry date, that there’s an upper limit on who should be making, playing, releasing and touring it. The concept of people passing through their 30s, 40s, 50s (and beyond) and not being allowed entry into the places where exaltation occurs on a four-four beat, that becoming a parent means you no longer experience escapism courtesy of Hot Chip, is one I can’t swallow.
Perhaps it’s simply because the hedonism associated with dance music is related to youth, Taylor ponders, after name-checking club pioneers such as New Order and Orbital as “groups older than us … who are in the clubs”. But the idea has Goddard thinking.
“It’s an interesting thing to speak about right now though, isn’t it?” he says. “Because simultaneously there’s a lot of discussion of young people not being so interested in clubbing … and less interested in hedonism.” After echoing a friend’s genius business idea (“Opening an old people’s home” for ageing ravers “that has half an hour of jungle in the afternoon before tea”), he draws a connection between the growing cultural irrelevance of clubbing among Gen Z and the pursuits they choose instead.
“I find the obsession with the gym and wellness positive, but I also think it’s a symptom of people feeling like they’re constantly being viewed,” he says. “And whether they’ll allow themselves to get mentally into a position where they might do something that’s a bit weird or be out of control in some way.
“In terms of human psychology, getting into a state that’s outside of your head – [which] might be just through dancing or it might be with drink or drugs or whatever – has been part of human culture for a really long time and I think it can be quite an important part of human culture. So yeah, I want my kids to feel like they can lose control and dance all night or whatever and maybe they’ll get into that moment. My son was going wild to Tyler last night. Maybe he’ll be a raver.” It would be a proud family tradition to carry on.
While Joy in Repetition encourages a kind of misty-eyed remembering of Hot Chip’s past, its members are squarely situated in the present. Goddard mentions his recent DJ set in a “roving sound system” – a guerilla truck tricked out with gear – outside 10 Downing Street in support of the people of Palestine. It was organised by DJ Gideön, the force behind Glastonbury’s legendary queer space NYC Downlow, who Goddard sees as representative of dance music’s vital political core. “It feels really difficult right now to not become involved in politics and trying to make your voice heard in terms of keeping venues open or pushing the arts or talking about AI as well and streaming rights.”
It’s yet another reminder that a best-of compilation is not only about nostalgia, that the band that soundtracked our memories is far from inert and solidified forever in amber. This is not about looking back on a complete project. Hot Chip are constantly moving, shifting their feet, facing this way and that, and urging us to do the same.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 17, 2025 as "In the loop".
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